Note: I have no idea what I'm talking about. I've been out of the
classroom for over a decade and do not really study professional
development.
It's seemed to me for a long time that one problem with teaching as
a profession is that unlike most professions, the jobs of a novice
teacher and the jobs of a veteran teacher are almost exactly the
same. You go in your room, close the door, and teach, coming out only
to go to the bathroom and maybe listen to your more poisonous
colleagues gripe in the teacher lounge. In most other professions
when you start you do sort-of ramp up to being a full-fledged
participant. My (again nascent) understanding of becoming a lawyer is
that when you start, you're not typically given your own cases to try
in front of a judge yourself. Instead you work with a mentor who
does the heavy lifting while you learn the ropes. By the time you go
to court by yourself, you've been a number of times already, know the
judge, and how things work. If you're good and work hard, you
eventually become a partner in the firm, fully vested in its success
and the training of new lawyers. (To me the analogy of tenure for a
college professor and becoming partner for a lawyer is apt, but it
does not at all seem analogous to my understanding of tenure in K-12
public schools.)
